The seven papers collected in this issue of American Mineralogist grew out of presentations made at a special session we convened at the 2002 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Denver. At that time, chemical dating of monazite using the electron microprobe was beginning to take off as a tool for high-resolution thermochronology in metamorphic terranes. Papers in the early and mid-1990s, for example by Suzuki and Adachi (1991a, 1991b) and by Montel et al. (1996), had pointed the way toward a viable non-isotopic dating method for accessory minerals (zircon, monazite, xenotime) and the articles by Cocherie...